TBH I’ve never had much luck with UGC, outside of Trackmania. But that’s a little different, in that you have (had?) player-run servers with playlists and the admins played “Track DJ”, so if you didn’t like the groove, you’d just switch to a different station. Also, while track styles can be wildly different, most of them were at most minutes long, so that the cost of trying one out would be negligible. And, there’s MP competiton “Makes Everything Better™”

Digressions notwithstanding, I’d better try and finish what is there before I speak.

Large Satellite Reassembly by Arki
JZT Launch Console by JZTemple
Mech Shop by MechanizedIt
Simple Cubic Lattice by Nekojita - richer than it first appears
Battle Station by Synthesis - ends up being ridiculously complicated

A conditional recommendations:

More Advanced Logic by Synthesis - the task looks impossible, but can be done if you build “handles” on your cube to be destroyed after it’s done. It definitely requires that you build a state machine as well.

Discernment by Gugunja - not nearly as hard as More Advanced Logic, but similar in that you need to build helper attachments and logic circuits.

I improved my Battle Station score from 833 cycles to 303, and I’m exhausted. I think I’ll set the game aside again for a while.

The thing about bumping the input rate is that it leads to catastrophic jams. While I’ve learned various ways to deal with jams, those tend to break down when the object getting jammed is large and complex. It’s also difficult to modify machinery when it’s buried deep under other machinery, and there isn’t much room to add traffic control down there anyway because I built up a bunch of stuff around the area that’s jamming.

At one point, everything was getting backed up because the Battle Station demands a cube with 4 printed sides, there’s a single face-printer, and everything was waiting on face-printing to advance. I thought my little printing machine was small and efficient, but there was a steady backlog of cubes building up, waiting for printing.

Eventually I managed a super-efficient setup which rotates the cube and bumps it back immediately. This takes 8 cycles to print all 4 sides. There’s a little delay counter that ticks off 8 cycles and then pushes the cube out of the loop. My standard state machines and counters didn’t work because a pulse every 2 cycles is generally too fast for most such constructs to respond.

I had two spots where I had to deal with uncertainty in the order of arrival of parts. At the start Part X would arrive before Part Y, but as things progressed Part Y would arrive first.

I improved my Battle Station score from 833 cycles to 303, and I’m exhausted. I think I’ll set the game aside again for a while.

The thing about bumping the input rate is that it leads to catastrophic jams. While I’ve learned various ways to deal with jams, those tend to break down when the object getting jammed is large and complex. It’s also difficult to modify machinery when it’s buried deep under other machinery, and there isn’t much room to add traffic control down there anyway because I built up a bunch of stuff around the area that’s jamming.

At one point, everything was getting backed up because the Battle Station demands a cube with 4 printed sides, there’s a single face-printer, and everything was waiting on face-printing to advance. I though my little printing machine was small and efficient, but there was a steady backlog of cubes building up, waiting for printing.

Eventually I managed a super-efficient setup which rotates the cube and bumps it back immediately. This takes 8 cycles to print all 4 sides. There’s a little delay counter that ticks off 8 cycles and then pushes the cube out of the loop. My standard state machines and counters didn’t work because a pulse every 2 cycles is generally too fast for most such constructs to respond.

I had two spots where I had to deal with uncertainty in the order of arrival of parts. At the start Part X would arrive before Part Y, but as things progressed Part Y would arrive first.

In any case the thing was a bloody mess.

I’m trailing in my first puzzle to all of you. >_> I have no idea how I’m going to do what you did in that GIF there.

Edit : How exactly do you keep block count low. Especially Helio, who seems to manage with a really small number of blocks.

Conveyer savings on larger blocks, especially big constructions laterally are cheaper to rotate, than convey. In the early levels I had some absurd contraptions which only worked at specific input speeds and were incredibly wasteful.

I’ll gif a few up, after I took a long break starting a late game level was terrifying so optimisation felt like a better place to dip back in.

It’s better not to focus too much on optimizations like block count or cycle count when you’re first playing. There’s a lot to learn just solving the puzzles and learning to use the various machines. Optimization’s really more for when you either want to revisit a puzzle, or (as Helio said) you want to back away from something that seems pretty difficult to solve without trying for optimization.

I personally don’t sweat the block count too much, because I’ll often put in helper blocks just to help myself visualize what’s going to happen, and I don’t always remember to remove them afterward. Things like a set of blocks laying out exactly how much space a part will occupy at a given point in the assembly line.

It’s also difficult to modify machinery when it’s buried deep under other machinery, and there isn’t much room to add traffic control down there anyway because I built up a bunch of stuff around the area that’s jamming.

I’m trying not to look too much at your post, because of my aversion to spoilers. However, on a sidenote, something I felt was missing as soon as I picked up the game, is a way to copy paste structures. Layers, for your problem?

Gus_Smedstad:

It’s better not to focus too much on optimizations like block count or cycle count when you’re first playing.

This is probably the best way to play the game, or any game (spending too much time fiddling, collecting, or seeking perfection hurts completion rates), it’s hard to resist the temptation. Just cobbling together some …thing that barely clears the leaves me disappointed and frustrated - which doesn’t help with completion rates, either.

While I’ve generally thought in terms of moving an existing structure, it’s true that copy / paste followed by deleting the original assembly would do the trick as well. Sometimes there’s a fair amount of stuff that needs to move over just one tile.

You bastards got me playing SpaceChem again, so thanks for that (no, seriously, thanks for that because it’s an awesome game and I’ve not played it in ages). Is there any way, in that game, to compare results with friends? I’ve got the (always awesome) histograms of course, but I don’t see any individual results listed. Or is that just an Infinifactory thing?

58 puzzles in Infinifactory, though the first 5 really don’t count since they’re tutorials.

Thanks. By count, that’s very similar to SpaceChem.

alms:

I think you need to press tab to switch.

Thanks, I was about to make a snarky comment about undocumented features, then I saw the very clear text alongside the graphs that says “press tab for leaderboards” so I’m just going to quietly slink away now.

I’ll gif a few up, after I took a long break starting a late game level was terrifying so optimisation felt like a better place to dip back in.

I’d be interested to see how you got any of the single figure block counts in particular - perhaps a link to an image elsewhere if anyone’s worried about spoilers.

I’m stuck on Shuttle Maintenance. I’ve assembled the engines, I can get them to either side of a waiting shuttle, but I can’t figure out how to weld them on!

@Deathpig - Yeah, don’t worry about any of the values you get at the end, just concentrate on getting any sort of solution initially. I’ve gone back to my finished solutions and optimised a bit since learning some more tricks in later puzzles.

I’m stuck on Shuttle Maintenance. I’ve assembled the engines, I can get them to either side of a waiting shuttle, but I can’t figure out how to weld them on!

I’ve started dabbling with that level the other day too, I’ve got the welding down, or… well at least for the right engine, I expect the solution to be more or less applicable to the left one too, though seeing how this game is, I may find out that I’ve missed some “small detail”.

No way in hell I can provide replacement engines fast enough, though I may be able to make it faster by providing engines as single blocks and welding them during final assembly, instead of assembling them beforehand.

Need to figure out how the game expects me to pace the input using piston blocks, as foreshadowed by the IKEA sign - it may simpler than I first thought, but at that point I wasn’t clear-headed anymore.

I’m stuck on Shuttle Maintenance. I’ve assembled the engines, I can get them to either side of a waiting shuttle, but I can’t figure out how to weld them on!

There are more ways to use welders than is immediately obvious.

Welders can point any direction horizontally, or down. Down’s usually one of the more useful orientations, since it doesn’t block the horizontal path of a part.

Welders don’t need to be opposite each other. The only important thing is that the business ends be adjacent. So you can, for example, have one welder point down to a cube, and another welder pointing to the cube below it from the side, and that forms a welding arc. I’ve had some somewhat S-shaped welding zones, now and then.

Also, a more advanced concept: it’s possible to attach parts to pushers. Such as welders. As long as the moving part is not attached to anything static, it will move when the pusher activates.

This makes it possible to move welders into position briefly, or simultaneously weld something and push it away.